Pete Hamill - Forever

He makes it across the pedestrian bridge at Chambers Street to the new building of Stuyvesant High School. This place will still be new when the boy is fourteen. Looking downtown, he sees flames rising angrily from the Marriott Hotel, and an immense column of smoke blowing now toward Brooklyn. Ambulances scream down the West Side Highway in one lane, and north again in another. The entire eastern side of the highway is starting to fill with heavy trucks, with emergency generators and lamps, with earthmovers, all aimed at the burning site, which the radio is now calling Ground Zero. Cormac locks the bicycle to a fence and hurries into Stuyvesant. The students are all gone, of course, the lobby now filling with doctors and nurses. Volunteers are unfolding cots. Technicians set up rigs for blood transfusions. But so far, a nurse says, the only patients are firemen with damaged eyes or blistered hands. Not a single civilian is there. She says these words in a mournful voice. She is saying that there are no survivors.

“If they come, we’re ready,” the nurse says. “But they’re not coming.”

Delfina isn’t at St. Vincent’s either. “Hey, man, she could be anywhere,” a black EMS driver tells Cormac. “ ‘East Side, West Side, all around the town…’ ” Then Cormac wheels back downtown, in and out of streets. Delfina’s nowhere that he looks. Cormac circles home, and she isn’t on his doorstep either. God damn it: I should have given her a key. She should have moved in with me when she returned from the Dominican Republic. I should have loved her more. God damn it all to Hell.

Now he has two bicycles but no lights. I’ll save one for the boy. The radio tells him that power is out from Worth Street to the Battery, from Broadway to the Hudson. Battery Park City is being evacuated. The boy will read all this in a history book, but I must tell Delfina to save all the newspapers. He was short of breath. I must tell Delfina how much I love her. Police are knocking on doors all over Downtown, afraid of fires, afraid of exploding gas mains. Come here, Delfina. Join me here, bring your inhabited body here as I close these drapes against the dust and the sirens and burn these logs in the fireplace. As we did in Ireland one terrible winter. The hearth will give us light and heat, and even food. As each hearth did before electricity surged in these streets.

Every muscle in his body now feels pulled and extended beyond all limit. He sleeps for two dreamless hours, and then goes out again. This time with a backpack slung on his shoulders, filled with a towel, a roll of bandages, a flashlight, a bottle of Evian water, and the box containing his mother’s earrings. They are for you, Delfina. When I find you, you will wear them. You will wear them when I’m gone.

This time too he takes his own bicycle, pedaling all the way to East Harlem. He locks the bicycle to a fence and buzzes his way into Delfina’s building. Look who’s here. El irlandés. El amigo de Delfina from the four’ floor … Here are Elba and Rosa and Marisol. All out in the hall, their doors open, their faces blank with shock and horror and the repeated images of towers flaming, smoking, collapsing. Here is Pancho the Mexican from the second floor. No, nobody had seen La Guapa Dominicana, La Soltera, from the fourth floor, the one that threw the party the other night. Cormac explains that she worked in the North Tower. There are sobs, tears, wailing. Que pesadilla … Elba from the third floor starts praying at the kitchen table, facing the Virgen de Altagracia, others come in and pray too, while the news from channel 41 plays in another room, the voices of announcers filled with urgency. Cormac glimpses images of the burning towers. A shot of one of the airplanes, black and small and low, aiming at the South Tower. They try to get Cormac to eat chicken and rice and then accept his refusal, spoken in his clumsy Spanish. A time like this who can eat? They give him a beer. They say it’s crazy Arabs, they say they hijack four planes, one of them hit the Pentagon. Pancho offers him a Pall Mall, which he smokes. Then Elba puts her arms around Cormac and begins to weep. They go with him in a procession to the fourth floor and he scribbles a note and slips it under Delfina’s door. Come to my house. I love you. C.

He pedals downtown along Lexington Avenue, whispering the lyrics of “Give My Regards to Broadway” as if the old tune were a dirge. He thinks that if Delfina tried to walk home and then fell, because she was somehow hurt and didn’t know it, stunned, in shock, if she fell like that, then she might be here in some doorway. Anywhere. Even up here. She wasn’t. The radio is now loud with the cause of the calamity. Islamic terrorists. Four different hijacked airplanes. Teams of hijackers armed with box cutters. A brilliantly simple plan, flawlessly executed. He tries to imagine those final seconds, tries to imagine himself at the controls as he soars toward the tower at six hundred miles an hour, tries to imagine himself shouting “Allah Akhbar,” and understands that the moment of obliteration might also have been a moment of consuming ecstasy.

“Tell all the gang at Forty-second Street that I will soon be there.” Nothing approaches ecstasy in P.J. Clarke’s on Third Avenue. Four men, each in a pool of solitude, stare at Peter Jennings on the TV set. The bartender seems to know that Jennings understands the Middle East better than most because he spent years there as a reporter, and so he does not flick from channel to channel. Jennings talks about a nation at war. On the jukebox Sinatra sings about Nancy with the laughing face and how summer could take some lessons from her. Cormac remembers when the song was first played on the radio, during another kind of war. Jennings is smooth and effortless as he moves from one piece of the story to another, but anger is very close to his urbane surface. On tape, the towers fall once more. On tape, the Cloud once more comes rushing between buildings or over their rooftops. On tape, men and women run north. The firemen run into the smoke. Over and over and over again. He peers at televised faces. He does not see Delfina.

Cormac orders a hamburger at the bar, remembering glad nights here in the 1950s, with Lady Day and Sinatra on the juke, and sometimes Sinatra himself at a table in the back room with Jimmy Cannon or Jilly Rizzo or William B. Williams, and dancers and stars coming in after the shows and the night stretching out forever. Fragments of songs move through him, and now on the juke Billie Holiday is singing “I’m a Fool to Want You.” The voice ruined, her ravaged face before him in a flash, alongside her beautiful face when she first arrived in 1936. None of the music sounds sharp, and he realizes that his ears are still plugged from the roar of the collapse. Cormac finishes the burger. Delfina is more beautiful than all those beautiful women of the 1950s. Summer could take some lessons from her, all right. And still the television tells the story of death and horror. Cormac forces himself to remember the Great Fire and the seven hundred ruined buildings and how a year later all were replaced. But that was when houses were three stories high and there were no airplanes, no gasoline, no God-sick lunatics prepared to kill thousands, including themselves. This is disaster nostalgia, he tells himself, a new category among all the New York nostalgias. He smokes a cigarette. Sinatra dead, Jilly dead, Cannon dead, Billie dead, William B. dead. The dancers are grandmothers. I’m alive, he thinks. Delfina is alive too. And so is the boy. I can feel it in my bones.

He pays the check and goes past the out-of-order cigarette machine through the side door into Fifty-fifth Street. The bike is where he left it. Even the thieves are home watching the calamity on television. And all the way up here, so many miles from Ground Zero, the air is dirty with the odor.